The Arts Count

In May 2018, the Arts Education Partnership published Music Matters. This was the first in a four-part series of special reports that used ArtsEdSearch to illustrate the many benefits of arts education. The Arts Counts series went on to publish Visual Arts Matters,...
What’s New to ArtScan in 2023?

What’s New to ArtScan in 2023?

Spring has officially sprung, bringing warmer weather, fresh blooms and a new round of updates to the ArtScan database! AEP collaborates with the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education and Education Commission of the States to update this resource to equip...

Restorative Justice for the Arts Media

Restorative Justice for the Arts Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project 20 Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project 16 Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project 15 Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project 13 Yorkdale Elementary Mural Project 12 Yorkdale...
What We Know About the Status of Arts Education

What We Know About the Status of Arts Education

Jamie Kasper and Claus von Zastrow also recorded Talking About Arts Education Data, a corresponding podcast episode for the Arts ARE Education Talk It Up podcast. In May 2021, AEP published a post titled What We Know – and Don’t Know – About the Status of Arts...
What the NAEP Results Mean for Arts Education

What the NAEP Results Mean for Arts Education

Since the release of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) results, countless articles and analyses have revealed the same troubling trend: reading and math scores declined at an alarming rate for fourth and eighth grade students in the 2021-22...
ARP ESSER Funds: What’s in it for Arts Ed?

ARP ESSER Funds: What’s in it for Arts Ed?

In March 2021, a year into the global Covid-19 pandemic, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) was signed into law to provide relief aid to entities across the United States. As part of this aid, $122 billion dollars — established as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency...
Restorative Justice Healing Through the Arts

Restorative Justice Healing Through the Arts

In 2019, Arts Education Partnership (AEP) began its arts and juvenile justice work with the goal of understanding the role of the arts in juvenile justice spaces and how the work could expand. AEP is now expanding its focus to restorative justice and the arts focused...

Centering Student Voices to Transform Educational Systems

As policymakers continue to rethink, reshape and reform systems, it has become vital to involve the appropriate voices in these conversations. Inclusion of the people who are directly affected by policy and funding actions in their communities leads to equitable...

ArtsEd Digest Archive

ArtsEd Digest Archive Here you will find all past issues of ArtsEd Digest, AEP’s bi-monthly newsletter highlighting news from AEP partner organizations and the field, including reports, research and job opportunities. Hidden 2025 Feb. 5, 2025 – ArtsEd Digest | AEP...

Our Shared Future

Our Shared Future: Imagining a New Landscape for Teaching Artists On April 5-7, 2022, we hosted a virtual event in support of teaching artists across the country. Our Shared Future: Imagining a New Landscape for Teaching Artists featured sessions that dug into the...
Power of the Arts: A COVID-19 Silver Lining

Power of the Arts: A COVID-19 Silver Lining

Remember when teaching was “only” about high achievement, standardized testing, active shooter drills and differentiating our instruction? All kidding aside, the fact that educators have been juggling those demands with the new educational landscape of...
New ArtScan: Update or Upgrade?

New ArtScan: Update or Upgrade?

AEP is committed to enhancing ArtScan to continuously meet the needs of our network as they utilize the database for their respective work. We are excited about this year’s update…or upgrade as some may consider it. Our goals with the changes this year are to make the...
A State Policy Vision for Arts Literacies Integration

A State Policy Vision for Arts Literacies Integration

The journey of a child through making meaning was one of the foundational learnings from the Arts Education Partnership’s work on The Arts and Literacies. Specifically, meaning making supports students to develop knowledge, awareness, appreciation and empathy of...

AEP Research & Funder Policy Briefing

Join us on March 29 for a FREE, virtual policy briefing for researchers and funders in arts and education! Explore existing gaps in arts education research and focus on creating a deeper dialogue among funders, researchers and practitioners during the policy briefing....

Title: 2280 Pasos Bajo un Cielo Nublado | Artist: Hernán Jourdan | Medium: Film

When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.

Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music

My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.

Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film

Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.

Title: Tercera Llamada | Artist: Karilú Forshee | Medium: Audio

La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.

Title: Literaseas | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite and ink on paper with digital edits

Title: A Riddle | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits

Title: False Binaries | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits